Re: kupdate & laptop's [patch for integration of mobile-update]

Zack Weinberg (zack@bitmover.com)
Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:42:46 -0700

Nix wrote:
> Zack Weinberg <zack@bitmover.com> writes:
>
> > Sort of like the
> > current handling of dtime in ext2.
>
> That's one thing that's been puzzling me; what's the point of the dtime
> attribute? Nothing in the kernel looks at it[1], stat() and fstat() (of
> course) cannot return it... is its purpose solely to help out those
> unfortunates trying to manually undelete files from an ext2fs
> filesystem, or what?

This is before my time, but I believe the original intent was that
deleted files would be preserved for some length of time - space
reclaimed only when needed or when they got "old enough" - so you
could undelete things without having to grovel through the raw disk.
That was never implemented as far as I know. See NetWare for a
similar idea.

Interestingly, there *is* no special handling of dtime in ext2fs: it's
set and the inode is marked dirty just like any other inode update.
So why is it, I wonder, that fsck always complains about deleted
inodes with zero dtime but rarely if ever about other inode
inconsistencies?

zw

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